Twitter Announces Micro-Censorship Policy

Within hours of the announcement, people had figured out ways to subvert Twitter’s blocking.

So much for the free-wheeling, libertarian reputation of Twitter. The company announced Thursday that it could start censoring certain content in certain countries, a sort of micro-censorship widget that would pop up up in a grey box on the Twitter feed.

“Tweet withheld,” it would read “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country.”

Twitter explained the change in a blog post on Thursday: “We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.”

In principle, that could apply to a message promoting Nazi ideology in Germany, a critical remark about the monarchy in Thailand, or perhaps even lines from “The Satanic Verses” in India, where the 1988 book remains banned.

Until now, the company explained, if a tweet had to be removed, it would vanish from Twitter pages worldwide. The company did not have the ability to selectively remove it country by country. Twitter declined to say how many posts it had removed in the past because it was asked to by a government authority. Twitter said it withheld content only in response to request from United States law enforcement officials.

Exactly why the company chose to make the change now remains unclear, except for its global ambitions. “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the blog post said. That could be a reference to China, where an official firewall screens content and where neither Twitter nor Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, operates. China has a hugely popular Twitter-like platform called Sina Weibo.

“One of our core values as a company is to defend and respect each user’s voice,” the blog post continued. “We try to keep content up wherever and whenever we can, and we will be transparent with users when we can’t. The Tweets must continue to flow.”

The change could have wide implications, since the majority of Twitter users are outside the United States.

Facebook and Google can also take down content that is illegal in a particular country or violates the companies’ terms of services.